Hammer and Pencil

There's a brutal truth and a zen-like inspirational quality to this picture. If you write, you understand. If you don't, well, substitute the pencil for your passion and you'll get it.

These last few weeks have been the typical busy I enjoy with my family, my job, my non-writing responsibilities. Recently, I challenged myself with several writing projects and have been very pleased with the progress. When I wait for a spare moment to write a story, it doesn't happen. Sometimes you just have to take the hammer and force the writing time into your life. So I did. It happens at night. Early in the morning. At lunch time. I've said it before, I know, but these last few weeks have seen a lot accomplished and it warrants a repeat.

Currently I'm participating in a writer shootout over at Martinus Publishing. Tons of fun with that. Writing stories, critiquing others. I'm also polishing up a third chapter for my serial, Zulu Time, at JukePop Serials. Four other writing projects have deadlines in the next few weeks as well. And there's the matter of a collaboration project with a friend (Hi, Leslie!) in need of a little attention in the days ahead.

Hammer and pencil, friends.

And don't forget the hammer.

A quick Google search on writing quotes always digs up shovelfuls of my favorites too.

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston Churchill

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

You got that right, Kurt. Why do I hate semicolons so much?